TOKYO -- My first encounter with Japanese plastic food models was in 1986, watching director Neil Jordan's neo-noir crime film, "Mona Lisa," in which a shifty businessman with a warehouse full of faux food samples points to a table covered with models. "You fancy a fiberglass fruit flan?" he inquires of a perplexed client, "or a polystyrene tutti frutti?"
The practice of making sanpuru (food samples) is said to have begun in Japan in the early Meiji era (1868-1912), with the arrival of anatomical models made of hardened wax, which were used as teaching aids in newly built schools of Western medicine. When businesses hit on the idea of creating food models to promote restaurant menus, the concept proved enormously appealing, but the models, also made of wax, were apt to fade and melt during Japan's humid summer months.
